Mind Over Matter: Mastering Daunting Moves

Renee Stonebraker is on the ice by 5:30 a.m. for lessons from Kevin Coppola at City Ice Pavilion in Long Island City, Queens.CreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times

By Julia Lawlor

April 24, 2014

OVERACHIEVERS, beware: In the pursuit of a challenging sport or discipline, there will come a time when you confront a move that your mind embraces but your body protests.

For Renee Stonebraker, a 51-year-old from Jackson Heights, Queens, who took up figure skating six years ago, that move is the loop jump. “I think it’s beautiful,” she said recently. “It’s extra frustrating that I can’t do it well. You practice something over and over and over for an hour, and you feel it’s only getting worse.”

For amateur athletes like Ms. Stonebraker, the answer to achieving the seemingly impossible involves one-on-one sessions with an instructor and putting in more time than feels humanly possible.

In addition to family life — Ms. Stonebraker is a mother of two — she juggles a full-time job in Midtown Manhattan as an art director for a jewelry company, competes on a synchronized skating team and takes Pilates lessons. She rises at 4 a.m. four days a week to be on the ice at 5:30. “I enjoy skating so much,” she said. “I look forward to it.”

In figure skating, the turns, spins and jumps are learned in sequence. Ms. Stonebraker had little trouble mastering the first two single jumps in a five-jump sequence — the waltz jump and the Salchow — but got hung up on the loop jump. To do the loop jump, the skater takes off from the right foot on the backward outside edge, does one rotation in the air and lands on the same backward outside edge of the right foot. After almost a year of focusing on it exclusively, she still can’t land it consistently.

Kevin Coppola, her instructor at City Ice Pavilion, in Long Island City, Queens, said there is usually an element of fear — even if it’s subconscious — with adults. “It’s easy for kids to throw themselves in the air, fall down and get back up,” he said. “When you’re older and you fall, you can’t get right back up and do it again.” Ms. Stonebraker has also injured her knee in the past, he said, which can create a mental block.

To reassure her, Mr. Coppola breaks down the move, step by step, and reminds her that she’s capable. “I tell her she knows how to do it and that she has to trust herself,” he said.

Fear is also what kept Nancy Tepper, 48, a mother of three on the Upper East Side, from mastering the challengingcrow pose in yoga. The move, an arm balance, involves squatting deeply, with your hands in front of you on the floor, then tipping forward and balancing in the air as you rest your knees on the backs of your upper arms, elbows bent, feet off the ground.

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Zac Borrowdale in a gymnastics lesson with Randy Dorleans at Field House at Chelsea Piers.CreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times

“I fell on my face,” said Ms. Tepper, who was so inflexible when she started doing yoga three and a half years ago that she couldn’t touch her toes or straighten her arms overhead. “The first class I took was one of the most pathetic moments of my life,” she said.

But she persisted and eventually asked Tanya Boulton, her instructor at Pure Yoga, to give her private lessons. Ms. Boulton tackled the fear aspect immediately. “I held her in the pose so she could experience it,” Ms. Boulton said. “It’s like training wheels. I put my legs next to her head, or I put a blanket down.”

As with so many difficult moves, core strength is essential for crow pose. Although Ms. Tepper has always been thin and physically fit — she runs, plays tennis and takes spinning classes — she needed a stronger core. So Ms. Boulton had her do a series of exercises, including situps and planks, while squeezing a block between her legs. She also had her hold a plank position while moving her knee to her forehead and rounding her upper back. After six months of twice-weekly sessions, she had it.

Working on improving his core strength was also what finally got Zac Borrowdale, 26, to master a handstand in sessions three times a week with his gymnastics coach, Randy Dorleans. Mr. Borrowdale, an Australian entrepreneur who moved to Manhattan last September, went to Mr. Dorleans, who teaches at the Field House at Chelsea Piers, with one overall goal: to develop a gymnast’s “ripped” physique. He also wanted to learn moves, like the handstand and front and back flips, that he could do in a hotel room without equipment when he was on the road. He had never done gymnastics before.

To prepare him for the handstand, Mr. Dorleans exhausted him with core-centric exercises like the “butt scoot.” While sitting, you hold your knees close to your chest, curl up in a ball and use your arms to lift yourself off the floor and forward six inches, repeating the movement until you reach the other side of the room. “I would do 10, then I’d have to rest,” Mr. Borrowdale said. “It was so painful.”

For the handstand itself, Mr. Dorleans had him kick one leg up, then the other, instructing him to hold his body straight as he fell into a soft foam pit. Eventually, Mr. Borrowdale paused at the top for five seconds and gradually began to hold the pose longer and longer. Next came the front handspring, and then the back flip, which continues to give him trouble.

“Leaning back and jumping is not something your brain wants you to do,” he said. So he’d hesitate.

Mr. Dorleans told him he was ruminating too much. He helped Mr. Borrowdale overcome the fear by spotting him, having him jump on a trampoline while using a harness. He’d change the subject, hoping to distract Mr. Borrowdale from worrying, then order him quickly to do the flip. That seemed to work.

“I have been known to overthink,” Mr. Borrowdale said dryly. He can now do a back flip into the pit and is working on executing the move on solid ground.

“I am having the time of my life,” he said.

And, no doubt, he’ll be doing back flips in the park by summer.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C32 of the New York edition with the headline: Mind Over Matter: Mastering Daunting Moves. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe